Another Greece entry! This one details our difficulties with shopping and acquiring expedition supplies before we left for the island. — Kate

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I’ve always been fairly adept at picking up languages. I think this ability runs in my family, as my dad learned Dutch in the year he lived in Rotterdam, and now in Bogota, he speaks fluent Spanish. In fact, like as not, he will answer a question in Spanish first, and then sheepishly respond again in English when we look at him blankly. Greek I found to be a bit more of a challenge. I have a smattering of Latin, I can recognise German, I am fluent in French, and I can pick through Spanish.

For some reason, Greek didn’t fit in the language centres of my brain, so I constantly found myself trying to remember pronunciations and vocabulary words.

This became an issue on the day that Sach and I bravely set out to conquer the Athens marketplace.

James, Sach and I had been in Athens a couple days by this point, long enough to recognize “our” square (Omonia) and the subway routes, and the location of different kinds of merchandise in the local shops. Since there had been a national holiday on Monday, June 20th, a lot of the excavation supplies we had planned to buy were inaccessible as the shops were closed up tight.

So, when Tuesday the 21st of June dawned, we had a plan. Sach and I were to go out for supplies in the morning, while James braved the long lines at the banks (there was a bank strike too!) to exchange traveller’s cheques for cash.

Things Sach and I set out to purchase: 1. First aid kits for the survey crews (gauze, tensor bandages, tweezers, scissors, tape, bentadine ointment, iodine, isopropyl alcohol, band-aids) 2. A SIM card for James’ cellphone 3. Some top-up phone cards to add money to the cellphone once activated. 4. Mosquito repeller thingies (these plug into an electrical outlet and burn a [probably carconogenic] tablet or vial of liquid that repels mosquitoes. Sach and I scoffed at these, but after a couple nights of being eaten alive, we decided cancer be damned and slept with them in our rooms. Libby and I kept the balcony doors open, figuring that would mitigate the effects somewhat.)

Sach had a little Greek-English dictionary, and I had a Greek phrasebook, so we bravely forged ahead into the twisty little streets, confident in our language facility and the fallback power of the mighty evro. The first thing we decided to get was the first aid supplies. It seemed obvious that a pharmacy was the likeliest place to get those items. So we started looking for green and white crosses and the pharmakeio signs. The first pharmacy we walked into was not what we were expecting. Instead of first aid supplies, prescriptions and the like, we were confronted by a bewildering array of beauty creams, cosmetics, shampoo, conditioner and personal grooming supplies. We quickly backed out the door and cast about for another cross. The next pharmacy looked more promising. We saw a red and white plastic box high on a corner shelf over some incontinence supplies. The box was labelled pharmakeio and had a red cross and a caduceus! Score! When we lifted it down, however, it was empty. The first trial commenced as the shopkeeper approached.

Making ourselves look as appealing as possible, we smiled big Canadian smiles and beamed amiable helplessness at her and pointed to the box, miming placing items into it, and said “Pharmakeio!” (confusing because it is not only the word for pharmacy, but also for first-aid kit).

This unleashed a torrent of unintelligible Greek and wild gestures from the woman. We tried to elaborate, but the situation got more and more uncomfortable. Finally we just shook our heads, said efharisto [thank you], placed the box back on the shelf and slunk away.

We walked out of that store feeling like complete idiots and way way waaaay out of our league!

We ducked into a handy alley and decided to bring out the big guns. Obviously we were much too cocky. Once we blew our conversational wad as it were (heh), we had nothing…we needed backup. So, we decided to write out all the words for different things we needed for the first aid kits.

Luckily Athens has no shortage of pharmacies. It seems as though there are clusters of them per block, all with slightly different merchandise.

We actually spotted a surgical supply store (prefaced by iatro-, which made me think of iatrogenic (illness or injury caused by a doctor), and so we figured that sounded medical enough [Iatros is Greek for doctor! Score!] It was stuffed to the roof with piles of walkers and canes and more incontinence supplies and toilet seat lifts and braces and everything else medical/surgical/therapeutic you could think of. There were also lots of the little plastic pharmakeio boxes! [As an aside, it turns out they are manufactured for car first-aid kits, because the law in Greece states that all automobiles must carry a first-aid kit].

Luckily the guy behind the counter spoke a little English so we managed through a combination of English, miming, pointing to the Greek words for bandage and antiseptic to get across the gist of what we needed.

Scan of Sach’s notebook: Some of the pharmakeio words we copied out. There’s bandage, scissors, antiseptic, etc.

We walked out of that store feeling like kings!

Heartened, we decided the next stop was the phone card. We saw some big flashy cellphone stores, but we decided to try a little hole-in-the-wall shop in a recessed shopping arcade. It was literally a small room, smaller than my office at Trent, with a battered office desk, a 1970s desk chair, a dusty potted plant, a filing cabinet and some empty industrial metal shelves.

The proprietor was an older man, quite portly, with incredible wings of silver hair sweeping back from his temples. He was wearing a white silky shirt with the sleeves rolled up, brown wool trousers, and brown suspenders.

Sach bravely leapt into the fray, asking for a SIM card. The man looked at us impassively for a moment and then turned around and rummaged in the filing cabinet. He carefully laid out an armful of brightly coloured cardboard packages on the desk, each from a different cellphone company. Sach remembered the brand of phone that Andy was using on the island, and luckily there was a Cosmote SIM card there. We looked at the package and it had a big 20 € sticker on it, plus the information that an 8 € phone card was included in the package.

We figured that was a fair deal and were all set to make our purchase when we decided to see if we could also get more top-up cards at this place as well.

So I began asking for a tilekarta and pointing to the part of the SIM card label talking about the 8 € top-up card. Tilekarta is what they call the smartcards used in the payphones, but I figured that it was close enough to what we wanted to get the point across. Sach contributed that we wanted a 50 € card. The man looked at us in puzzlement and then whipped out a pad of paper from his pocket and ponderously removed a pen from his shirt pocket.

He wrote 20 € on the pad of paper and pointed to the SIM card box. We nodded. Then he decisively crossed it out and wrote 15 € and then looked at us expectantly.

I looked at Sach. He looked at me. Were we haggling? Had we somehow been misunderstood?

Figuring we might as well go with it, Sach paid the 15 € and we asked again about the phone cards – the man then told us we could get them from the sidewalk kiosks in the area.

We walked out of that store feeling like masters of commerce!

The rest of the morning passed quickly. Filled with new confidence, we managed to purchase tweezers from a beauty supply store, and the top-up cards for the cellphone.

Then came the mosquito repellers. We ended up in another pharmakeio, and when the shopkeepers noticed us, we confidently uttered kounoupi (mosquito).

They stared at us for a second, and then motioned to the stack of mosquito repellant lotions and sprays. Hm…this wasn’t exactly what we were looking for.

I tried adding “coil” [kouloura] into the mix. Never having seen these mosquito repellers, Sach and I assumed they were something like the mosquito coils used here on patios and decks [Miming of a coil followed].

Blank looks.

Sach and I had prepared our lexicon wisely in advance, so we had copied down the word for electric. “Ilektrikos! Ilektrikos Kounoupia! [mad miming of mosquitos flying away from a device plugged into the wall]“.

Scan of Sach’s notebook: Some of the words we copied out. There’s electric mosquito on the left, plus some other useful words and concepts and memos.

Success!

They had three of them, and were amazed when we bought them all. I can’t tell you how many stores we completely cleaned out of stock. Most of the shops we visited had maybe one or two of everything. Ordering in mass quantities like we did blew them away.

The rest of the morning passed quickly, and so Sach and I headed back to the hotel to wait for James.

At one point, there was a knock at the door, and Sach, thinking it was James, roared “THERE’S NO ONE HERE!!!”, only to scare the living daylights out of one of the housekeepers. The look on Sach’s face was priceless.

After that, Sach dozed on his bed, and I lounged on the other bed, trying to stay awake by reading the Rough Guide to Greece. After rendezvou-ing with James, we set our sights on the last part of shopping.

We bought: 1. A camp stove and very dodgy looking gas cannister from a combination diveshop/camping supplies/pet food store/aquarium store. 2. A large aluminum pot, two electric kettles, two coffeemakers, two thermoses from a teeny little shop which still managed to have (one or two of) just about everything. There were sequined flip-flops on a big rack by the doorway – very popular item in the local stores. The kettles and the coffeemakers were indispensible on the island. The pot was used three times, the gas cannister twice. The thermoses, instead of keeping heat in, performed a complex exothermic reaction of radiating all the heat from the liquid inside to the surrounding area. Result? Burning the crap out of one’s fingers as one tried to pour a cup of tea or coffee. 3. Three decks of Magic: The Gathering cards from a little game shop/computer store/book store that was just about to close for siesta. 4. Clipboards, stapler, staples, pens, markers, paperclips, bulldog clips, pencils, erasers from a hole-in-the-wall stationers. 5. Computer keyboard (I stood outside the computer/bookstore with all our accumulated purchases and attracted some puzzled looks from passers-by). 6. Discount Mart food!

After picking up the land rover, making it to Piraeus, and fending off some persistent hawkers selling what looked like pickpocketed tourist paraphernalia (the full story of this expedition to follow), James and Sach left me to guard the car and contents while they went in search of a grocery store. They arrived a short while later, absolutely laden with bags and completely spent.

Amount of food purchased in Piraeus before driving the land rover onto the ferry: “..all the food that James and I could carry, plus just one bag more, each…” – Sach

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